Some wisdom needed regarding upgrade.

Hello there,

My girlfriend has recently been given a pc by her dad for Xmas.
Its an Acer ***-pire M1641,
This is what cpu-z/PC Wizard says;

-Celeron E1200 1.6ghz dual core,
(currently running at 1200 mhz, Is that normal?)
-MB Acer MCP73VE (chipset Geforce 7050, South bridge nForce 620i
-1 gig DDr2 pc5300
-160 gig HD
-Vista home premium sp2

Now as you can imagine it runs slow as hell, even with every bell and whistle turned off, It needs Ram badly, but heres where im unsure.

Her dad gave us £50 to buy some ram too, I cant decide whether to get;
4gigs of cheap ram off ebay,
2 gigs of good ram off newegg or
put in an extra £10 ourselves and get 4 gigs of good ram off newegg.

I play Rome TW, which plays ok.... once it finally loads.
But my GF also bought me Medieval2 (which runs too laggy 10-15 fps) and also Empire (which im scared to even try).

New ram might help Med 2 (maybe) but it aint gonna make Empire run, but is it worth getting a new graphics card? Ive read bad things about the E1200.

We were so exited by the idea of getting a new PC but for me its turned into a pain in the a** really, of all the puters he coulda got, he got the absolute slowest of the slow, my old p4 runs 4x the speed of this one.

I havnt told my GF how i feel about it though, its got a 19 inch wide screen with it, to her that means modern and snazzy, i dont wanna burst her bubble too.

So what ram guys? and Video card or no?

Cheers guys.

Adey

 

I think 2gb ram would be enough.

However I think the pc needs some cleaning up and defraging

Basic computer maintenance everyone should do

 

That should be the first thing done on a machine that is given to you. That and some good scanning just in case.

 

My GF's dad said it had a terrible malware problem, but he cleaned it out. There doesnt seem to be any virus/malware issues as far as i can tell, not like what ive experienced in the past anyway. Ive ran all the scans from the malware sticky (comboFix, malwareantibytes ect) and its all come up clean.


I defrag every couple of days with perfect disk, i have disabled every graphical feature except vista button style, i have no bloat-ware. Only thing running is AVG and some MS security essentials doo-dahh, and when i play RTW i even turn these off along with net connection and explorer, basically every thing non essensial and it still takes about 3-5 minutes to load a map on RTW.

Navigating windows is mind-numbing,:banghead

Im still thinking its a ram problem, so ill get 2 gigs from newegg, if its still bad, i might install Xp, i'd be glad to see the back of Vista anyway.

Cheers guys


Adey

 

1gb ram and vista is very low. Could cause the issue. Back in the day when I ran vista home premium on 2gb ram it was using 1gb

I had 1gb to start with and it was kidnof slow.

 

Do not Defrag the often as it can and will lead to the death of HDD. I do it once every 2-3 months at best and only if have installed and or removed a lot of software.

I would guess that the 1.2GHz you observed would be an Emergy Saving feature within the BIOS like EIST, C1E or TM2 etc and you should notice that it will hit 1.6GHz as soon as you start using the CPU for activity.

 

Thanks buddy, just one more question, can i keep one 512mb stick in one slot and put a 2 gig stick in the other slot?

 

That should be fine, possibly list what RAM you are interested in.